Planet Javasummit

"My first impression of my predecessor was a positive one," writes Michal Ochman, "he was well-spoken, sharply dressed, and seemed to be an all-around nice guy."

"My first impression of my predecessor's code was also positive — it was sanely structured, well-commented, and all-around seemed pretty clean. And then I started actually looking through it. It was filled with a lot of... well... this."

<?php

/* Base 64 Encoding function **
** PHP does it natively but just for consistency and 
** ease of maintenance, let's declare our own function **/
function base64Encode($plain) {

  // Initialise output variable
  $output = "";

  // Do encoding
  $output = base64_encode($plain);

  // Return the result
  return $output;
}

/* Base 64 decoding function **
** PHP does it natively but just for consistency and 
** ease of maintenance, let's declare our own function **/
function base64Decode($scrambled) {

  // Initialise output variable
  $output = "";

  // Do encoding
  $output = base64_decode($scrambled);
 
  // Return the result
  return $output;
}

?>

Michal continued, "after getting to know some of my new coworkers, they described my predecessor as 'seemingly a nice guy at first, but really just a phony'. I guess I could see that."

For a ramen-fueled college student, a job offer that actually involves doing the work you're in school to learn and has a paycheck that can't be beat flipping burgers is a wonderful score. For Ted, that score came from a company run by alumni from his school that gave out pretty plum gigs to top students.

They were a support company, that contracted out to run the IT infrastructure for other companies. While the support company actually cut Ted's check, they were a small company. 90% of their business came from a single customer, the PubCong publishing conglomerate. It was for PubCong that Ted would be actually working.

"It's a little bit of a mess," Chris, Ted's boss, explained as he showed Ted around the server room. It didn't look like a mess- to the contrary, it looked like a top-flight server room all the way from beneath the raised floors to the million dollar cooling system over their heads. "It's so clean in here because we're the first people in here in six months that weren't here to dust. They paid a lot of money to have this installed, but they didn't actually hire anyone to maintain it until we came along."

Chris broke down some lowlights of the Mad Maxian <script src="http://www.cornify.com/js/cornify.js" type="text/javascript"></script> wasteland of administration-by-user, but it boiled down to, "the hardware's in great shape, but everything else has been installed, configured, and maintained by secretaries, janitors, and a creepy Austrialian kid with a razor boomerang." They didn't know what was installed or where it might be deployed, or who was responsible for it. For the time being, Ted was given an SSH shell account, some instructions to help run an inventory, and the command to "poke around, but don't break anything, try not to get killed."

Chris ran off to do whatever it is bosses do, and Ted did exactly as ordered until 6PM. The service-desk phone started ringing. Ted eyed it for a ring or two. He wasn't really sure if he should take the call- he was new, hadn't really been trained, and didn't know the procedures. Still, he had done campus helldesk. It was probably just a printer jam. Ted could handle that. Before the fifth ring, he answered.

"…you useless idiotic foolish- hello? Finally. The phone's been ringing for ages. It's Steve. You need to fix mi email."

Ted's helldesk instincts kicked in. "Okay, Steve. This is Ted. What kind of trouble are you having?"

Steve spoke in slow, even tones, as if he were explaining the complexities of quantum mechanics to a hungry, brain-damaged shark. "I. Can't. Read. My. Email."

Ted forced himself to smile at the handset, and asked, "Are you seeing some kind of error?"

"'Authorization failed.' Look, can you actually fix this or not?"

Ted went down the basic email-problem checklist, but just getting Steve's username was a challenge. "What do you mean you don't know my username? Are you slow, or something? I'm Steve!" Eventually, Ted confirmed that stevem had been hammering the POP3 server for most of the day, and the password had failed until the account was locked. Ted also noticed that the user data for stevem indicated that he was a C-level executive for the company.

"Well, it does look like your password is incorrect," Ted said.

"I'm sure you think so Tim, but I have it written down right here in front of me. I know what my password is."

"Well, perhaps you mispelled something," Ted offered helpfully.

"Then tell me what my password is and I'll check."

"I can't tell you your password," Ted said.

"Excuse me, Todd? Do you know who I am? If you value your job, you're going to tell me my password right now!"

Ted wasn't going to fiddle with an account password just because someone was screaming at him, even if he could have checked what it was. These mail accounts were also shell accounts, and he wasn't going to grant some hacker access to the system just because they screamed loudly on the phone. "I can't do this over the phone," Ted said, "but if you're in your office, I can come down and reset your password."

"In the office? Are you insane? It's 6:15. Some of us are busy people, Tad. Now tell me what my password is. Now are you going to do what I tell you or…"

"Let me get Chris on the line," Ted said. Chris knew Steve, and after only a few seconds of listening to Steve screaming about the coming lawsuit, Chris confirmed that Steve was in fact, Steve M, the CIO of PubCong. Chris gave Ted permission to do anything Steve asked.

"Okay," Ted said, "I'll just reset your password…"

"I don't want it reset. Just tell me what it is you moron!"

Ted set Steve's password to "stevie123" and said, "Oh, it's 'stevie123', all lower-case."

"Hmm… that's not what's on my post-it. Mine doesn't have any numbers in it. No, it doesn't work. You've given me someone else's password."

Ted checked the logs, and saw no attempt had been made to log in. "No, that really is your password. You're trying to log in as stevem@pubcong.com, right?"

"What? No. Stevem@aol.com. Y'know, the email service. How can you work in IT and not know that!"

Back in 2002, this crazy idea of responding to 9/11 by attacking Iraq first started being floated. And now we’re getting stronger and stronger whiffs of Dorky Middle East War, the Sequel: Iran. Can the sensible people of the world please stand up and say ”Please, let’s not do that“.

It’s getting to the point where the New York Times has matter-of-fact articles like Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets. On top of which, some of the particularly bloodthirsty members of the LikudAmerica fringe are pushing like crazy on that Overton Window, for example see Does AIPAC want war?

Puzzling Evidence

It seems self-evident to me that an Israeli coup de main against Iranian nuclear facilities would be unlikely to have any effect that is positive for Israel or negative for Iran. Evidence suggests (if you read the Israeli media) that this also seems self-evident to the Israeli military leadership.

So why the continued sabre-rattling? I’ve read two theories:

• The Israelis are trying to convince the US Administration that they’re crazy enough to do this in order to extract concessions, bribes for them not to. I don’t believe this, because it seems to me that Netanyahu’s administration has got pretty well everything they want from Obama’s: no real pressure on settlements or human-rights issues.

• Some week, the Israelis are going to tell Washington they’re attacking next week, and the US knows it would be such a disaster that they conclude that they’ll have to do the attack on Israel’s behalf. But this is the one thing I can’t see the US administration, as Netanyahu-friendly as it is, even contemplating. Obama got where he is in some part on the basis of having been right about Iraq.

So I don’t know what the hell is actually going on. But recall the run-up to the Iraq war very vividly, and it isn’t making me happy.

Why It’s a Dumb Idea

I asserted above that an Israeli attack on Iran would be stupid and counterproductive. I ought to provide some arguments to back up that claim.

• As that New York Times article makes clear, the risk of failure is very, very high.

• It would strengthen Iran’s dictators. One of the few things that could cause the population to rally around the much-despised mullahs and Revolutionary Guard would be an actual foreign attack.

• Chances are that a few minutes after the attack started, Hezbollah missiles would start flying out of South Lebanon. The conventional wisdom is that they have more and better missiles than in the 2006 war, and could potentially drop a few right into Tel Aviv.

  Now, there’s no doubt that the IDF would dearly love a chance to have another run at Hezbollah. It wouldn’t be a surprise if they did better than last time. But it also wouldn’t be a surprise if they didn’t; which feels like a deeply stupid bet for an Israeli politician to make.

Nuclear Iran?

Obviously, it’s perfectly sensible to worry about a nuclear-armed Iran; it’s fought recent wars with its neighbors. But it seems to me that it’s the neighbors who should be worrying.

I just can’t see any scenario in which Iran, if it did get a usable bomb that could be delivered at that distance, would try to nuke Israel. Here’s why: The mullahs and Revolutionary Guards who are oppressing Iran are doing just fine, thank you. They’ve managed to fend off the opposition, the oil business is good, and it’s easy for a ruling elite to ignore sanctions pain, as Saddam Hussein showed us all.

If they were so silly as to make Israel feel existentially threatened on Tuesday, Tehran would be a smoking radioactive crater on Wednesday, and that would be bad for business.

American Politics

Someone is fomenting a war. It’s hard to figure out who, and why, exactly. But this is scary as hell.

Right now, US politics is at a fever pitch. Seems to me that this campaign slogan might be worth trying: “Israel shouldn’t attack Iran, and if they do they’re on their own. As President, I won’t start a war with Iran unless they threaten America.”

After weeks, months, or even years of setting up and preparing to sell, it’s always exciting to get those few customers. Depending on the venture, it may not be worth popping open a bottle of Champagne, but no matter how small the sale, one can’t help but take a few moments to pause and smile before struggling to get that next batch of sales.

By the time the 13,853rd customer rolls around, no one blinks an eye. It’s just business as usual. That is, unless you work at Ruben’s company. When a new customer record is created, their server not only takes a moment to celebrate, but it nearly brings down the entire server with this unique way of finding the next available customer number:

SELECT * FROM customer
WHERE id_customer  != '4' AND id_customer !='10' AND id_customer !='11'
  AND id_customer !='13' AND id_customer !='14' AND id_customer !='15' 
  AND id_customer !='16' AND id_customer !='17' AND id_customer !='18' 
  AND id_customer !='19' AND id_customer !='20' AND id_customer !='21' 
  AND id_customer !='22' AND id_customer !='23' AND id_customer !='24' 
  AND id_customer !='25' AND id_customer !='26' AND id_customer !='27' 
  AND id_customer !='28' AND id_customer !='29' AND id_customer !='30' 
  AND id_customer !='31' AND id_customer !='32' AND id_customer !='33' 
  AND id_customer !='34' AND id_customer !='35' AND id_customer !='36' 
  AND id_customer !='37' AND id_customer !='38' AND id_customer !='39' 
  AND id_customer !='40' AND id_customer !='41' AND id_customer !='42' 
  AND id_customer !='43' AND id_customer !='44' AND id_customer !='45' 
  AND id_customer !='46' AND id_customer !='47' AND id_customer !='48' 
  AND id_customer !='49' AND id_customer !='50' AND id_customer !='51' 
  AND id_customer !='52' AND id_customer !='53' AND id_customer !='54' 
  AND id_customer !='55' AND id_customer !='56' AND id_customer !='57' 
  AND id_customer !='58' AND id_customer !='59' AND id_customer !='60' 
  AND id_customer !='61' AND id_customer !='62' AND id_customer !='63' 

  ... snip several thousand lines ...

  AND id_customer !='13789' AND id_customer !='13790' AND id_customer !='13792' 
  AND id_customer !='13793' AND id_customer !='13794' AND id_customer !='13795' 
  AND id_customer !='13796' AND id_customer !='13797' AND id_customer !='13798' 
  AND id_customer !='13799' AND id_customer !='13800' AND id_customer !='13801' 
  AND id_customer !='13802' AND id_customer !='13803' AND id_customer !='13804' 
  AND id_customer !='13805' AND id_customer !='13806' AND id_customer !='13807' 
  AND id_customer !='13808' AND id_customer !='13809' AND id_customer !='13810' 
  AND id_customer !='13811' AND id_customer !='13812' AND id_customer !='13813' 
  AND id_customer !='13814' AND id_customer !='13815' AND id_customer !='13816' 
  AND id_customer !='13817' AND id_customer !='13818' AND id_customer !='13819' 
  AND id_customer !='13820' AND id_customer !='13821' AND id_customer !='13822' 
  AND id_customer !='13823' AND id_customer !='13824' AND id_customer !='13825' 
  AND id_customer !='13826' AND id_customer !='13827' AND id_customer !='13828' 
  AND id_customer !='13829' AND id_customer !='13830' AND id_customer !='13831' 
  AND id_customer !='13832' AND id_customer !='13833' AND id_customer !='13834' 
  AND id_customer !='13835' AND id_customer !='13836' AND id_customer !='13837' 
  AND id_customer !='13838' AND id_customer !='13839' AND id_customer !='13840' 
  AND id_customer !='13841' AND id_customer !='13842' AND id_customer !='13843' 
  AND id_customer !='13844' AND id_customer !='13845' AND id_customer !='13846' 
  AND id_customer !='13847' AND id_customer !='13848' AND id_customer !='13849' 
  AND id_customer !='13850' AND id_customer !='13851' AND id_customer !='13852' 
;

I like square photographs and wish my camera shot that way. Recently there’s been a flurry of good online talk about picture shapes.

Back in January, Mike Johnson (AKA The Online Photographer) asked: Why Not Square Sensors? This struck a chord with me, and I echoed it on Twitter. Alex Waterhouse-Hayward emailed me an eloquent little essay, mostly in opposition. I asked him to blog it and now there’s The Perfect Square.

Mike Johnson brought in guest blogger Kirk Tuck to write They stole our choice of aspect ratios. Now we’re getting them back. If you’re arguing about pictures, I think you ought to argue with pictures; so I offer Jon Ellis’ Tokyo Square.

Everybody knows that a square format works well for isolating the subject of a portrait.

But this one, happily square, is about as much unlike a portrait as can be imagined.

Ideally, I’d like the subject matter of a picture to speak as directly as possible to the person looking at it, with as little presentational clutter as possible. I can make an argument that a square presentation represents the minimum possible decoration at the level of shape, and that any departure from it is a choice that you’re imposing on the contents.

I don’t actually believe that. But I do recommend the following practice, which I apply to nearly every photo I edit: Early in the editing process, I jam it into a 1:1 aspect ratio and see if that’s going to work. I don’t always leave it there, but sometimes I do, and some other times I find myself making just a few little adjustments, ending up almost square.

Anyhow, I’d totally love to shoot with a square-sensor camera.

It was Cottage Life that drove us to it. We like being there but haven’t enjoyed getting there. The water taxis are friendly and efficient, but they run on strict schedules, and leave from places that require fighting through rush-hour traffic. So we bought a boat.

Boating isn’t really a geek thing, and I’m struggling a bit trying to find words that are both interesting and nautical. But it’s taken a lot of our time and attention; “write what you know” they say, and I know a whole lot more about boats than I did a few months back.

Key Findings

What you might want to know if thinking about a boat:

1. If you walk around a marina, you’ll notice a lot of the boats look neglected. In fact, pleasurecraft are like exercise machines; more than half languish untouched from one year to the next. So think twice first.

2. Almost nobody buys new. The hulls wear out very slowly, and the things that go inside them (motor, electronics, pumps, you name it) can be replaced. The cost of new boats is shocking, while used boats are surprisingly reasonable.

3. You can find a ton of boats on Craigslist or wherever, but you probably shouldn’t try to buy one yourself. There are “boat brokers” for the same reasons there are real-estate agents. You need to hire experts to do what they call “surveys” and “mechanicals”, and you don’t know who to call. Also, the broker can find lots of interesting boats for sale that aren’t on Craigslist. See the Credits below for a recommendation.

4. Most cities with a lot of boats have not-quite-as-many places to moor them. So either you have room to store it on a trailer, plus mad reversing-with-a-heavy-hitch skillz, or you’d better start the parking-spot hunt before the boat hunt.

5. You just gotta learn the lingo. If you don’t know what cuddy and transom and head and freeboard and kicker (and many more) mean, you’re not going to make it through.

6. It really is a thrill to head out across part of the Pacific ocean, even if that part is entirely surrounded by a big city.

The Facts of the Case

Here it is, up “on the hard” as we sea-dogs say, being surveyed. It’s a 25-year-old Limestone 24-foot Express Cruiser. They’re still making it, with the design essentially unchanged, but the site is an all-Flash horrorshow; can’t even link to this particular model.

1. It’s got the original engine, but that’s been rebuilt a couple of times and it tested out brilliantly.

2. Basically nothing else is original; the electronics and furniture and galley and head and kicker and pumps and so on have been lovingly upgraded.

3. The electronics are new and first-rate. We’re talking serious geek joy; the panel has a paged display that supports overlays or side-by-side for radar and/or maps and/or GPS and/or depth-gauge. I haven’t mastered it yet. I wonder if there are hackers’ builds of the software?

4. Cruises comfortably at around 20kt, which should get us to the cabin in under 90 minutes.

5. It constitutes a comfy guest bedroom for the cabin.

6. It cost less than either of the last two automobiles I purchased.

7. I had a stroke of unreasonably good luck and got a nice moorage at Burrard Civic Marina. As the name suggests, it’s operated by civil servants and ain’t luxurious, but the location couldn’t be better: close to home and right on English Bay.

8. It will be named Bodoni after an old friend of a similar color.

Less Important Things

For amusement’s sake.

1. There is nothing remotely hip about powerboats. The new ones, if they’re big, are all about the 1% rubbing it in your face, with furnishings representing the nadir of suburban vacuousness. Smaller craft tend to muscle, and a NASCAR flavor. Used ones express mostly the bad taste of past decades. The one we got is appealingly unadorned outside and comfortable inside, but looking at it doesn’t warm my heart.

   Sailboats, by contrast, are lovely and express more contemporary values. I’ve sailed some and liked it lots. Unfortunately, it’s hugely time-consuming and not really a good choice for getting your family from here to there.

2. There aren’t many places near town you can tie up your boat and get a nice lunch with a good beer. This seems like a market failure.

3. “BOAT” stands for “bring out another thousand”. There are many ancillary expenses.

4. We’re naming the boat after a font. While there are boat-lettering specialists out there, the ones we’ve talked to have displayed a shocking lack of typographic sensibility. This problem remains unsolved.

5. To drive a boat legally around here, you need something called a Pleasure Craft Operator Card. It’s not exactly hard to get. Confession: I haven’t been able to resist, with nearly every woman I know who’s a good enough friend for this sort of thing, pulling it out, leering, and saying “May I operate your pleasure craft?”. Not one has failed to dissolve in helpless giggles.

Credits

We so totally couldn’t have done this ourselves.

1. Our boat broker was Paul Shield of Allied/Tri-Shore, and he took outstanding care of us. I’d recommend him unhesitatingly.

2. Orientation and education by Cooper Boating. If we manage to get there and back with reasonable comfort and without loss of life or limb, it will be thanks to their classroom and on-the-water training.

3. Boat survey and repair by Stem To Stern, who as a side-effect raised my consciousness about things maritime and mechanical.

  Wout van Poppel remarked, "Yesterday's newspaper didn't really contain any interesting news, but at least the photo captions were interesting."

 

 Christian Riesen normally enjoys playing the lottery, but for now, he's is going to hold onto his money for another day.

 

"I saw this while upgrading the Samsung KIES software on Windows. Wasn't sure if I should accept the empty license agreement or not," wrote Scott C..

 

"I got this error when trying to upgrade PostgreSQL using its 'Stack Builder' package installation tool," writes David, "I guess these guys must really like cloud computing!"

 

"If I'm reading this right," notes Andrew, "If I can earn 5 more points and become a 'Gold Member", Starbucks will give me free coffee for every non star I receive."

 

 

"Judging by this email I received from Equifax, I guess I can assume that null news is also good news," writes Dwayne.

 

 

"I was rushing to catch my train at St. Pancras the other day, but it seems I did so for nothing," writes Dazzie B., "The train wasn't due to arrive for another week!"

 

This one is in the bad end of Gastown, across the street from the Alibi Room where we’d been for Valentine’s-day festivities.

Yeah, the light really was that yellow.

Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to apply the word “Camping” to OWS and framing the issues [1].

Lester Macgurdy wrote an insightful article about “the snake”, a new technique for OWS protesters to beat riot police [2].

Ron Barassi suggests that “Australia Day” be celebrated on the 27th of May to commemorate the day in 1967 when the Australian constitution was amended to not be racist [3]. The current “Australia Day” is often referred to as “Invasion Day”. IMHO Ron deserves another “Best and Fairest” award.

Stefon Harris gave an entertaining TED talk about improv Jazz music titled “There Are No Mistakes on the Bandstand” [4]. It seems that his concepts can apply to some extent to many collaborative projects.

John Robb wrote an interesting article about the future of drone (UAV) warfare [5]. He suggests that having one person control each drone is a temporary thing and that the future is to have a cloud of cheap autonomous drones taking strategic control from one person. His comparison of Starcraft players to future drone fighters is interesting.

The OWS movement is branching out into other related areas, OccupyYourHomes.org is one of the latest ones [6]. When banks try to forclose on homes without good cause the OWS people are protesting.

Cory Doctorow wrote an important article for The Guardian about corporations using the Youtube ContentID system to pirate works that other people have uploaded [7].

Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” will never die [8]. It has spawned many other creative descriptions of the evil and greed of Goldman Sachs and even Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs describes his company as having “burned down the Reichstag, shot the Archduke Ferdinand and fired on Fort Sumter” – he was trying to use satire, but I don’t think that Goldman Sachs people would act differently to Fritz Thyssen.

Keith Packard wrote an interesting article about the Calypso CalDAV system which he uses with Android [9]. He makes lots of good points about how to improve calendaring and contacts on Android, unfortunately I lack time to fiddle with such things at the moment so I’ll stick with Google in spite of the risks.

Asheesh Laroia wrote a great article about the problems with short (32bit) GPG keys [10]. It seems that creating keys with matching ID numbers isn’t particularly difficult and that GPG doesn’t handle them as well as we would like giving the possibility of at best annoying DoS attacks and at worse security problems due to using the wrong key.

Sociological Images has an interesting article about when game show audiences are trustworthy [11]. It seems that French people don’t want an undeserving person to win so they will intentionally advocate the wrong answer if the contestant should know it.

Paul Wayper gave a great lecture titled “SE Linux for Everyone” [12]. He covers the basics of SE Linux in a user-friendly way and explains some simple solutions to common problems which don’t involve compromising system security.

Paul Tassi wrote an insightful article for Forbes about piracy [13]. His conclusion is that the media companies should make it cheaper and easier to be a customer and not spend insane amounts of money on low quality products.

The Reid Report has an interesting article about Ron Paul’s racism [14]. Ron Paul is generally well regarded outside the US because he wants the US government to stop meddling in the affairs of other countries, but while he’s less bad than other US politicians in terms of foreign policy that doesn’t make him a good person.

Anonymous hacked some mailboxes belonging to a neo-Nazi group and found links to Ron Paul [15]. I’ve always been suspicious of the way Ron Paul wanted to avoid anti-racism legislation on supposed Libertarian principles.

The Reid Report has an interesting summary of Ron Paul news plus some criticism of Glenn Greenwald and others who associate with him [16].

• [1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/06/on-camping-and-the-framing-of-occupy-movement-strategies/
• [2] http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creating-blueprint-for-other-occupations/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/6mr95hu
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand.html
• [5] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/12/drone-bonjwas.html
• [6] http://occupyourhomes.org/
• [7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/12/pirates-of-youtube-cory-doctorow
• [8] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/the-long-life-of-the-vampire-squid-metaphor/
• [9] http://keithp.com/blogs/calypso/
• [10] http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/short-key-ids-are-bad-news.html
• [11] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/26/are-game-show-audiences-trustworthy/
• [12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZThVfm3JXdM
• [13] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/02/03/you-will-never-kill-piracy-and-piracy-will-never-kill-you/
• [14] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/12/the-real-bottom-line-on-the-paul-newsletters-race-baiting-for-power-and-profit/
• [15] http://www.care2.com/causes/anonymous-hacks-neo-nazis-finds-ron-paul.html
• [16] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/12/should-glenn-greenwald-have-to-own-the-ron-paul-blue-plate-special/

Related posts:

1. Links February 2011 Australia’s Department of Finance has mandated that the MS-Office document...
2. Links January 2012 Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They...
3. Links February 2009 Michael Anissimov writes about the theft of computers from the...

Late last year I wrote about the way that modern laptops suck [1]. One of the problems that inspired that post was the excessive heat generated by my Thinkpad T61.

There is a partial solution to this, Fool Control explains how the kernel option pcie_aspm=force can be used on kernels from 2.6.38 onwards to solve a heat regression problem [2]. I applied this to my Thinkpad T61 and the result was that on a cool evening (ambient temperature about 24C) the temperature changed from 85C to 66C on the NVidia video card, and for the “virtual devices” it changed from 80C and 78C to 60C and 61C. I’m not sure exactly what each of those measurements refers to, but it seems that the change was somewhere between 17C and 20C.

This changes the system from being almost unbearable to use to being merely annoyingly warm.

I’m not going to make my laptop be my primary computing device again though, the combination of a desktop system with a 27″ monitor and an Android phone is working quite well for me [3]. But I haven’t yet got version control systems working for all my software. Also Wouter suggested using NBD which is something I haven’t got working yet and probably won’t until I can swap on it and therefore have a diskless workstation. Finally I still haven’t got the “Chrome to Phone” browser extension working such that a page I’m viewing at home can be loaded on my phone.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/09/09/modern-laptops-suck/
• [2] http://foolcontrol.org/?p=1511
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/09/08/laptop-to-cloud-lifestyle/

Related posts:

1. Taking my Thinkpad Apart and Cooling Problems I’ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently....
2. thinkpad back from repair On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix...
3. I Just Bought a new Thinkpad and the Lenovo Web Site Sucks I’ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796....

I’ve just discovered that the magic database for the file(1) command in Debian/Unstable has no support for Linux Software RAID and that it’s support for BTRFS is lacking (no reporting of space used, number of devices, or the UUID). Below is my first draft of a change to fix these problems. I would appreciate it if someone with a big-endian system could test these out and let me know how they go, I suspect that I will have to change the “lelong” types to “long” but I’m not sure.

4096 lelong 0xa92b4efc Linux Software RAID
>4100 lelong x version 1.2 (%d)
>4112 belong x UUID=%8x:
>4116 belong x \b%8x:
>4120 belong x \b%8x:
>4124 belong x \b%8x
>4128 string x name=%s
>4168 lelong x level=%d
>4188 lelong x disks=%d

0 lelong 0xa92b4efc Linux Software RAID
>4 lelong x version 1.1 (%d)
>16 belong x UUID=%8x:
>20 belong x \b%8x:
>24 belong x \b%8x:
>28 belong x \b%8x
>32 string x name=%s
>72 lelong x level=%d
>92 lelong x disks=%d

# BTRFS
0×10040 string _BHRfS_M BTRFS Filesystem
>0x1012b string >\0 label "%s",
>0×10090 lelong x sectorsize %d,
>0×10094 lelong x nodesize %d,
>0×10098 lelong x leafsize %d,
>0×10020 belong x UUID=%8x-
>0×10024 beshort x \b%4x-
>0×10026 beshort x \b%4x-
>0×10028 beshort x \b%4x-
>0x1002a beshort x \b%4x
>0x1002c belong x \b%8x,
>0×10078 lequad x %lld/
>0×10070 lequad x \b%lld bytes used,
>0×10088 lequad x %lld devices

Related posts:

1. Label vs UUID vs Device Someone asked on a mailing list about the issues related...
2. Starting with BTRFS Based on my investigation of RAID reliability [1] I have...
3. Software vs Hardware RAID Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim...

Based on my investigation of RAID reliability [1] I have determined that BTRFS [2] is the Linux storage technology that has the best potential to increase data integrity without costing a lot of money. Basically a BTRFS internal RAID-1 should offer equal or greater data protection than RAID-6.

As BTRFS is so important and so very different to any prior technology for Linux it’s not something that can be easily deployed in the same way as other filesystems. It is possible to easily switch between filesystems such as Ext4 and XFS because they work in much the same way, you have a single block device which the filesystem uses to create a single mount-point. While BTRFS supports internal RAID so it may have multiple block devices and it may offer multiple mountable filesystems and snapshots. Much of the functionality of Linux Software RAID and LVM is covered by BTRFS. So the sensible way to deploy BTRFS is to give it all your storage and not make use of any other RAID or LVM.

So I decided to do a test installation. I started with a Debian install CD that was made shortly before the release of Squeeze (it was first to hand) and installed with BTRFS for the root filesystem, I then upgraded to Debian/Unstable to get the latest kernel as BTRFS is developing rapidly. The system failed on the first boot after upgrading to Unstable because the /etc/fstab entry for the root filesystem had the FSCK pass number set to 1 – which wasn’t going to work as no FSCK program has been written. I changed that number to 0 and it then worked.

The initial install was on a desktop system that had a single IDE drive and a CD-ROM drive. For /boot I used a degraded RAID-1 and then after completing the installation I removed the CD-ROM drive and installed a second hard drive, after that it was easy to add the other device to the RAID-1. Then I tried to add a new device to the BTRFS group with the command “btrfs device add /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2” and was informed that it can’t do that to a mounted filesystem! That will decrease the possibilities for using BTRFS on systems with hot-swap drives, I hope that the developers regard it as a bug.

Then I booted with an ext3 filesystem for root and tried the “btrfs device add /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2” again but got the error message “btrfs: sending ioctl 5000940a to a partition!” which is not even found by Google.

The next thing that I wanted to do was to put a swap file on BTRFS, the benefits for having redundancy and checksums on swap space seem obvious – and other BTRFS features such as compression might give a benefit too. So I created a file by using dd to take take from /dev/zero, ran mkswap on it and then tried to run swapon. But I was told that the file has holes and can’t be used. Automatically making zero blocks into holes is a useful feature in many situations, but not in this case.

So far my experience with BTRFS is that all the basic things work (IE storing files, directories, etc). But the advanced functions I wanted from BTRFS (mirroring and making a reliable swap space) failed. This is a bit disappointing, but BTRFS isn’t described as being ready for production yet.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/06/reliability-raid/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Related posts:

1. Discovering OS Bugs and Using Snapshots I’m running Debian/Unstable on an EeePC 701, I’ve got an...
2. Reliability of RAID ZDNet has an insightful article by Robin Harris predicting the...
3. How I Partition Disks Having had a number of hard drives fail over the...

Today is the fourth anniversary of my colon cancer surgery. As my oncologist once explained to me, the remission clock starts ticking from the date of the "curative procedure" (surgery). Therefore as of today I have now been in remission for a full four years. Much of the time since the surgery and the subsequent months of chemotherapy remains a bit of a blur and loking back, the time seems to have flown by.. I am so thankful to all of the wonderful doctors and nurses that have cared for me so well and that I am still here to enjoy life and watch my kids grow up.

As always I am incredibly grateful to all of my family and friends around the World who have been there for me the past four years. I could not have made it this far without you. The recent sad news about the death of Steve Jobs reminds us that no one, no matter how rich or poor is immune from cancer's evil reach. I encourage all of you to support cancer research in any way that you can. Likewise, to anyone reading this who has also been touched by cancer, I would just like to say keep up the fight and that you are in my thoughts and prayers.

PS - If you have been putting off getting a colonoscopy, get one. It could save your life!

By the school calendar, which around here is the one most people live by, as of today, Summer is officially over. This is despite the fact that this week we will most likely break the old record of 69 one hundred degree days in a calendar year. The high yesterday was around 105F and it is forecast to be about the same again today. I forget when we last had serious rain but it has been months. Unless we get a tropical storm come ashore soon it may be many more weeks until we do get some rain. I love the hot weather but in my fifteen years here I have never seen a drought like this one. We usually get some good storms, especially during the Spring to top up the lakes. This year that did not happen.

Anyway, my kids happily (yes happily) went back to school today. They even got up at 6:20am and woke me up! Robyn is going into eighth grade and Jack fourth. They have grown so quickly. Robyn is thirteen now and Jack will be ten in December. Where does the time go? Anyway, above is a photo, which has become a bit of a tradition now, of the kids going out the front door on the first day of a new school year.

In 1986, August the 4th was a Monday and it was my first day as an IBM employee (at Hursley Park in the UK). Twenty five years later, I'm still working at IBM (these days in Austin, Texas).  It's been an incredible journey both emotionally , technologically and geographically (from Hursley to Austin with seven years in Boca Raton, Florida in between). I have worked with some fantastic people on some very cool projects and been lucky enough to make great friends all over the World.

The 25 years have flown by!

Those of you that check-in here from time to time, and the site statistics tell me that there are still a lot of you, for which I am grateful, may be wondering what I have been up to and why I have not been posting of late. In short I have been busy at work, very busy with the kids and also had to have a spot of unexpected (and very painful) surgery from which I have been recovering since mid June.

Anyway, here is a quick update on the Summer so far...

Things medical

At the end of May I met with my colo-rectal surgeon and he performed my (now semi-annual) internal exam. Everything looked good. However, while he was checking me out he told me that I had a cyst that needed to be dealt with surgically (not cancerous). More on that in a minute!

On June 9th I met with my oncologist and he ran all of the usual tests. While I always hope for the best, this is always a nervous time for me. None the less, I am happy to report that all of my tests came back clean. Still no evidence of further cancer. I can now go twelve months before he wants to check me again. This is significant progress.

On June 10th I had surgery to take care of the cyst. The procedure ended up being a bit more involved that I had hoped it would be. Without going into details it was in an awkward place and for several weeks it was really hard to sit down and I was in a lot of pain. The wound is still healing but is in much better shape now. Hopefully in a another week or so it will have finished healing. The surgery really knocked me out of my stride for a few weeks and even now I do not feel that I fully have my energy back.

On top of a few other stresses in my life at the moment I really feel like a cannot catch a break. I hope to take a couple of weeks off soon and find a beach to lay on somewhere or something equally restful!

The Kids

Despite the intense drought and soaring temperatures we have been enduring for well over six weeks now, the Kids are having a great Summer and spending a lot of time in the pool. Robyn was able to escape the heat mid June, when she left along with 40 other kids and four adult leaders on a People to People expedition to the UK and Ireland. They visited an amazing set of places all over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. She got to do many things that even I, growing up there, have never done. She got to hit golf balls at St Andrews, ride the London Eye, watch a Trebuchet catapult launching a fire ball at Warwick Castle, she got to abseil down the walls of another castle in Bangor (Wales) and so many other amazing things. She took over 900 photos! I think this trip will leave her with fantastic memories and hopefully a few new friends as well!

Work

Work is very busy which is a good thing and has also helped keep me distracted a bit from other things.

Finally, less blogging more tweeting....

Finally, I will observe that while I have not been posting here much lately, that I have been making regular posts to both Twitter and Facebook and more recently Google+ as well. If you have not already done so, feel free to find me at one or more of those venues.

That's the update for now. Take care all!

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The latest Beta release of the new release of IBM Lotus Symphony (version 3) has been posted and is available for free download. Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

So I am mid way through my third week of using Symphony as my primary office tool for working with spreadsheets, documents and slides. This week I have been on many conference calls reviewing slides with people. I noticed that I am getting sent a lot more Open Document Format (ODF)files from many of my colleagues. As a standards guy it's nice to see we are using the same standards ourselves that we have worked so hard to embrace and help define. I have also been sent several Power Point (PPT) files this week. So far, I have been able to work with them all fine in Symphony. As a UI guy, I do keep spotting things in the UI that I think could be better and the development team has been very gracious in agreeing to look through all of my feedback. That's it for now, I have some slides to go work on!!

In response to: My Symphony Experiment - week 2

So far there is nothing I have really needed to do that I have not been able to. That said while I am a self confessed "geek" I try not to be a super power user in any of the Office Suites as I find myself having to share my work with a lot of different audiences (customers, colleagues, conferences etc) and I have learned over the years that avoiding the advanced features seems to be a good general rule. It's the old 80-20 principle yet again I suppose. That said I view the evolution of all the ODF based tools in the industry to be just that, an evolution. I think we will see incremental improvement each release.

In response to: Mac OS X 10.6 (a.k.a Snow Leopard)

I have discovered this evening that some of the plug ins I use with Safari on the Mac had stopped working under 10.6 I was able to get them going again by running Safari in 32-bit mode. To start Safari in 32-bit mode, locate it using the Finder, click on the icon and select Get Info. There is an option to launch the app in 32-bit mode. The plug in I most wanted to work that this fixed was the Delicious plugin that I use frequently to help make bookmarking sites on Delicious.com easier.

To Our Friends and Supporters,

In these challenging economic times, business has slowed, many companies have had to resort to layoffs and/or closures, and everyone has been tightening their belts. Unfortunately, Colorado Software Summit has not been immune to this downturn. As have so many companies and individuals, we too have experienced a severe decline in our business, and as a result we are not able to continue producing this annual conference.

This year would have been our 18th conference, and we had planned to continue through our 20th in 2011, but instead we must end it now.

Producing this conference has been a wonderful experience for us, truly a labor of love, and we have been extremely privileged to have been able to do well by doing good.  We are very proud of the many people whose careers flourished through what they learned here, of the extensive community we built via the conference, and of the several businesses that were begun through friendships made here. We treasure the friends we made, and we consider them to be part of our extended family. Just as in any family, we celebrated with them through joyous life events and grieved with them through tragic ones.

This is a sad time for us, of course, but not overwhelmingly so. It's sort of the feeling you have when your son leaves for college, or your daughter gets married. You knew it was coming someday, but it is here much sooner than you imagined, and the sadness is sweetened with the joy you had in all that has come before.

We have been privileged to have created a thriving community of friends who met for the first time at the conference, and we want that community to continue. We hope that all of you will stay in touch with us and with each other, and that the Colorado Software Summit community will continue as a source of wisdom and friendship to all of you. If you have ever attended one of our conference, we hope you will consider joining the Colorado Software Summit LinkedIn group as one means to keep in touch.

With our very best wishes for your future, and with unbounded gratitude for your support,

- Wayne and Peggy Kovsky -

All presentations from Colorado Software Summit 2008 have been posted.

We have posted additions to the preliminary agenda for Colorado Software Summit 2009, in two formats:

• Agenda sorted by speaker last name
• Agenda sorted by topic title

We will continue to post additions to this agenda during the coming weeks. Please check back here from time to time for additions and/or changes to the agenda, or subscribe to our RSS feed to receive notifications of updates automatically.

Presentations from the 2008 Conference

We have posted presentations, and notes on the presentations, for this speaker from Colorado Software Summit 2008:

• Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Whiskey Media: "Build Better, Faster: An Introduction to Django" and "Presentation Notes"
• "Building a Web Framework: Django's Design Decisions" and "Presentation Notes"

Presentations from Colorado Software Summit 2008 will be posted periodically throughout the year.

We have posted additions to the preliminary agenda for Colorado Software Summit 2009, in two formats:

• Agenda sorted by speaker last name
• Agenda sorted by topic title

We will continue to post additions to this agenda during the coming weeks. Please check back here from time to time for additions and/or changes to the agenda, or subscribe to our RSS feed to receive notifications of updates automatically.

Presentations from the 2008 Conference

We have posted presentations for these speakers from Colorado Software Summit 2008:

• Tom Harrington, AtomicBird: "Getting Started with iPhone Development" and "iPhone User Interface Design"
• Denise Hatzidakis, Perficient, Inc.: "Put Your Feet Up and Take a RESTful Approach" and "From Zero to sMash"

Presentations from Colorado Software Summit 2008 will be posted periodically throughout the year.

We have posted additions to the preliminary agenda for Colorado Software Summit 2009, in two formats:

• Agenda sorted by speaker last name
• Agenda sorted by topic title

We will continue to post additions to this agenda during the coming weeks. Please check back here from time to time for additions and/or changes to the agenda, or subscribe to our RSS feed to receive notifications of updates automatically.

Presentations from the 2008 Conference

We have posted presentations for these speakers from Colorado Software Summit 2008:

• Bill Dudney, Gala Factory Software LLC: "Core Animation on the iPhone: How to Build Animated UI's" and "Building Location Aware Apps on iPhone: Taking Advantage of the Location Aware Nature of iPhone"
• Filip Hanik, Covalent: "Zero Latency HTTP: Using Comet with Apache Tomcat" and "What the Bayeux? Understanding, Using and Developing with the Bayeux Protocol"

Presentations from Colorado Software Summit 2008 will be posted periodically throughout the year.